Torrington Board of Education evaluates proposed budget structure

By
Isaac Avilucea, The Register Citizen

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

TORRINGTON >> The Board of Education plans to take a hard look at the efficacy of an administrative restructuring Superintendent Cheryl Kloczko pushed hard for last year to see whether the school district is getting enough “bang for its buck.”

The school district has seven building-level administrators, including a director of secondary education, said Chris Rovero, chairman of the budget committee. He said it’s two more than the district had before the reshuffling.

In the interim, Kloczko will put together a report to quantify the effectiveness of the additional administrators before she ultimately presents a proposed budget in mid-March.

District officials, in the coming weeks, plan to generate a “red list” of proposed cuts.

For Wednesday night’s purposes, the meeting was effectively an opportunity for school administrators to justify requests included in a district wish list that accompanied the board packet.

Rovero said he wanted to involve school administrators earlier in the process to lessen negotiations in slashing the district’s $73 million proposed budget, which represents a 5.5 increase from the current year’s $69.2 million spending plan.

“I’m trying to do it a little bit differently this year,” Rovero said. “I wanted to bring the administrative team on board earlier. The goal was to cut down on that back and forth.”

Few concrete cuts were discussed at Wednesday’s meeting, although athletic director Mike McKenna made an impassioned defense to have more than $60,000 in proposed cuts to middle school athletics put back in the budget. A few board members, including board vice chairwoman Fiona Cappabianca, openly supported the idea.

The board discussed supplementing cuts to the middle school program by making intramurals more “robust.” Most school have intramurals and middle school athletics, and McKenna said 225 kids of nearly 1,200 students enrolled in the middle school participate in athletics.

McKenna said 17 of 22 of Torrington’s coaches are certified teachers, making it a more “educationally-based” athletic program. City league coaches are more concerned about wins and losses, he said.

Eric Baim, director of secondary education, said enrollment would dip with students leaving for private and parochial schools with athletics.

“It’s the link,” Baim said. “You’re talking dropout rate. Your talking failure. And then I have to come before you guys.”

Rovero agreed.

“It’s going to be public outcry,” he said. “We do this to ourselves every year.”

Board chairman Ken Traub asked for latitude to establish a method, through advertising or fundraising, to make money for athletics. A revision to the city’s charter would likely be needed in order to put the money, specifically earmarked for athletics, into a untouchable city-designated fund, so athletics aren’t “fodder for budgetary debate,” Mayor Elinor Carbone said.

“We’re all fighting for the same dollar,” Traub said.

Other items discussed included requests for a teacher at Torringford to ease classroom sizes, an English as a second language teacher; a secretary and an in-school suspension coordinator at Torrington High School.

Baim said an in-school suspension coordinator, which is budgeted for $42,000, is vital and would alleviate the need for teachers to cover that duty. As it stands, teachers rotate periods to supervise students.

“I don’t think the teachers enjoy doing it,” Baim said, adding the school district has lost nearly 900 hours of instruction time dealing with students assigned in-school suspensions.

District officials also discussed the merits of adding a life skills teacher at Torrington High School to compensate for a slight increase in classroom sizes next year, from a 17-to-1 students-to-teacher ratio to 18-to-1.

“I’m having a tough time believing this can’t be absorb by reshuffling the duties of some people,” Cappabianca said. “I think we have to look at every last resort before we add additional staff.”

Rovero wasn’t comfortable adding two special education teachers, despite the expectation that the school district will have 200 special education students at the middle school level next year. The current setup is stepped, with four special education teachers for sixth grade, and three each for seventh and eighth.

Traub proposed adding one special education teacher, who would split time between seventh and eighth grade classes.

“We are making it by,” Rovero said. “We have been doing it.”

The board could see nearly $80,000 added to its instructional supplies line item, Rovero said, if it finances the cost of new band instruments.

If made as a one-time payment, the instruments would cost about $109,000 after more than $112,000 in rebates. If financed over multiple years, it could cost the board an additional $20,000 in interest alone, or nearly $130,000.